@RobertHarvey No, that's the old normal. They are actually sharing stuff now, which is certainly a step in the right direction.

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user102937

@Catija I'll rephrase my question. Is the new policy to put proposed changes to the platform into the Mod Teams first for review? Or was that only done as a courtesy to the mods so that they don't get blindsided by their communities?

I'm not here to stir up any more trouble. In a way, I'm glad that SE has decided to focus on the site mechanics for awhile, and the way they are doing seems to be really constructive. I just wish they would consider finding a way to clean up the Superfund site, that's all.

And by "here" I mean in the actual facts. The leaker's controversial opinions/suppositions are not supported by any facts and seem to have been designed to create drama where there otherwise would be none.

if I hadn't posted it, someone else would. I got notified about its existence thanks to the archive.org plugin, and given the link repairing activities of a lot of network users, I highly doubt I'm the only one using it

@PM2Ring I'm not sure any mods would have wanted to convince them not to change it. Well, I guess there's at least one. Seems like a fairly minor change overall, and the reasons for reverting it seem pretty solid.

Yup. It's honestly infuriating. SE is finally attempting to make some attempts to communicate with us (even if not in the way we want exactly yet) and them some doofus goes off and decides they don't care about any of that.

@ErikReinstateMonicA remember that one time where that guy did that thing and we were all like oh man! but he said that thing back making the situation worse and I went up and did that other thing and we were all like [spoiler redacted] about all of it but we forgot the day after.

FWIW, some folks lurk meta these days that never lurked meta. I'm skeptical if a polarizing issue such as . . . whatever that was can be discussed in its own merit unless it feels like business as usual in the meta.

I dunno if I'm allowed to say it on here, but the leaked post was really just one-sided because it only quoted the question while there are many answers providing constructive feedback, and even a follow-up question also with constructive feedback...

Honestly though... things like 'guy/guys' work better to be at least perceived as gender-neutral if they aren't followed up with 'sorry, person' or 'and gal'. (I hate being the afterthought 'and gal' personally...)

user102937

That's the price you pay for having a gender policy.

user102937

It's going to happen. I've already caught myself a couple of times using he or (s)he before posting, only just remembering that neither is appropriate anymore.

Ehh... there's a slight difference between addressing and 'talking about' that I feel I should point out here because I'd feel like a horrible mod otherwise: If you're addressing someone, you generally don't need third-person pronouns. If you're talking about someone, and know their pronouns, use those, not generic he (or at least don't get mad if your post is edited, and you're in trouble if mods find out you knew but were avoiding the correct ones deliberately).

That's how I took the changes, anyways...

Anyhow... 'focus on behaviour, not specific users' + a form of gender neutral writing being to change single for plural should get you a long way ;)

Incidentally, if I wasn't explicit before, I apologize for posts referencing something that wasn't supposed to be public. It may be too late for this, but on reflection, it would probably have been better to roll this change out without any reference to gender.

I may have made that less likely.

It would, though, be nice, to use the SO developer survey gender data to validate a gender inference algorithm (that could then be applied to questions like this), but I suppose that's not something most users are going to care about.

@rene is most likely right, the room started as a "Room for [User A] and [User B]" and those appear after ordinary rooms (i.e. rooms created by "create a new room" button) by design. — Shadow The Princess WizardSep 3 '17 at 22:25